Skyrim: Kill Dragons in the Great Craggy North (Special Edition Now Available)

Update (10/28/2016): Skyrim Special Edition (which includes the base game as well as all DLC) is now available via Steam, Xbox One and Playstation 4. You can find mods for the PC at Nexus Mods or Bethesda.net. You can also get mods for Xbox One and Playstation 4 at Bethesda.net (I believe it's only possible to mark a mod for the consoles as "in your library" and they must be downloaded within the game on the console).

Note: Most of the information below regarding modding should still be accurate to Skyrim SE. There's very little that's changed in terms of modding processes since Morrowind. However, the links to specific mods are not guaranteed to work. I recommend searching on nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition for the mod you're interested in rather than trying to use the version linked below.

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Update (6/4): As the title says the Legendary Edition is now available on Steam for $59.99(US). If you haven't already bought Skyrim it's a great way to get into the game. All three DLCs (Dawnguard, Hearthfire and Dragonborn) plus the original 50+ hour game for the price of a single new game.

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In his infinite wisdom, our great mod Mortus, all hail the mighty tiburón, hath decreed that there shall be a new Skyrim thread. Acting the (temporary) role of arm of His Toothiness I shall provide.

First off, the original thread can be found here. Inside you will find 300+ pages of speculation, angst, humor, stories of elation and fear as well as the rambling thoughts of many temporary denizens of Tamriel.

There are a lot of things that this post can contain, but in the service of brevity and getting you into the game (and discussion ) quickly I will keep it to a few, important things:

1. Important SitesOne of the most common questions to come up in any Skyrim discussion is "How does $Mechanic work?" There are two resources that can answer this question in (nearly) as much detail as you want:

The UESP Wiki - UESP has been the wiki the go to location for information on the Elder Scrolls series for years and as such it tends to be where modders, tinkerers and those who break the game down and identify the formulas that drive the game post information.

The Elder Scrolls Wiki - The Elder Scrolls wiki is much newer than UESP and it tends to focus on a high-level understanding of the game.

If you're looking for walkthroughs, character information or just browsing for random information you should tend to head to ESW. If you're looking for an in-depth breakdown of the mechanics behind a skill, finding about known bugs with the game (and their fixes) run straight to UESP.

Modding is another big part of Skyrim (well, actually all Bethesda games ) and there are three places to look for them:

Skyrim Nexus - The Nexus sites have been a home to mods for the Elder Scrolls series since the Oblvion days and it has a huge following of both modders and users.

Steam Workshop - The Steam Workshop was actually just opened alongside the release of Skyrim's Creation Kit. Even though it's so new because of the complete Steam integration it's gathered quite a large number of mods already.

Skyrim GEMS - A fairly extensive list of recommended mods, broken down by category. Not all are guaranteed to work together, but they do a decent job of giving compatibility caveats.

Which one you use is mostly up to you. My general recommendation is to use the Workshop if you're just looking to do some light modding. It's unlikely that you'll encounter any real problems with a dozen or so mods that each touch different areas of the game and the ease of use of the Workshop really makes trialing new mods easy. Just beware: due to changes that Bethesda made to the save system it's more important than ever to keep copies of a savegame from before you installed a mod to an existing game. Other than that caveat the Workshop is great.

Skyrim Nexus is where you'll want to go if you're going to be doing heavy modding. Their mod manager (I'll link to it in a minute ) is pretty easy to use and integrates well with the website. In some cases you will find that certain mods that you might want to use are kept exclusive to one of the sites by their authors. That's ok. Mixing mod installs between the two is (mostly) ok and will not usually cause you any undue headaches. So long as you use one of the tools in the next section...

2. Tools

BOSS - BOSS is a load order manager and is simple to use and essential if you're going to be using more than a few mods that use plugins together. Install BOSS, install your mods and run BOSS. That's it (well, there's more if you have a really complex mod install, but for most people that's it).

Nexus Mod Manager - Easy to use, one click downloads from the Nexus website and automated and scripted installs (for mods that have an install script). NMM allows you to control your install order as well as which mod's resources take priority when conflicts arise.

Wrye Bash - The latest evolution of the original Wrye Mash, the first real mod manager for the Elder Scrolls series. It's a very deep program and that depth can be daunting. In return it provides you with (pretty much) absolute control over your mods. Bash also has some features (that are not yet really completely compatible with Skyrim) that can help to overcome certain types of conflicts that can arise between mods. I wouldn't consider it essential at this point since those conflict resolution features aren't fully compatible with Skyrim. NMM is simply easier to use, but Bash is (IMO) well worth the learning curve. It's what I use exclusively.

Steam Workshop - Included here for completeness on the Mod Manager front. Easiest to use, but with that ease comes lack of control. Again, it's great for playthroughs that don't use many mods.

Mod Organizer - Several people here have recommended this, but I can't. Not because it's bad, I just don't know. Never used it and I don't intend to.

Earlier I mentioned that there were two questions that got asked frequently. The second is:

3. What Mods Should I Use/Do You Recommend?Over the past year (and nearly a half) the community here has put together many posts answering this question. I'll approach the subject here in three parts. The first will be to outline a few of the mods that are considered to be essential.The second will be to provide a small, quick visual overhaul list. First time players should start there. It's dead simple to install a few visual mods, there's very little risk of conflicts and (almost) no risk of issues in the game from it.The third will be to provide links to the posts in the first thread that contain user's personal mod lists. As time goes on and this thread gains more of these I will do my best to update this section as appropriate.

3a. Essential Mods

Unofficial Skyrim Patch - Essential community fixes. The modders involved with these patches are the peak of the modding community and reflect years of modding and fixing Bethesda games.

Skyrim Script Extender - SKSE is essential to the operation of a small, but growing, subset of mods. Any mod that requires SKSE (and has a good author) will inform you of such on their mod page. Installing it is as simple as moving the .dll and executables from the archive into \Steamapps\common\Skyrim\ That's it.

SkyUI - It's pretty much agreed that there aren't many user interfaces that are worse than vanilla Skyrim's. SkyUI is a vast improvement and with it's latest version has included a mod control panel that any mod can use to present you with configurable settings. No more using annoying pop-up boxes for configuration!

Alternate Start - Live Another Life - Allows you to perform character creation immediately upon starting a new game and select a "background" for your character that skips the vanilla start for the game (Helgen). The main quest will start when you get within a small radius of Helgen

I have had it pointed out to me that there NPCs who have an annoying tendency to get killed by the various dragon and vampire attacks that target the player. It's reasonable to consider NPCs that are not fighters attacking and getting killed during these sequences a bug, so here's two mods that can fix that issue (thanks IntCiv ):

Run for Your Lives - Makes citizens in a village or city run indoors during a dragon attack.

When Vampires Attack - Dawnguard adds random vampiric attacks while the expansion is active. This mod causes citizens in a village or city run indoors during those attacks.

Static Mesh Improvement Mod - perhaps the first thing that I will install in the future (even before texture mods) it has options for compatibility with vanilla style textures as well as Skyrim HD. Enhances the lower polycount static meshes that shipped with Skyrim.

SkyrimHD - Of all the texture mods out there (unless something's changed in the last few months) SkyrimHD is the most complete and the most authentic to the original look. There are a few standout textures that don't quite work, namely wood textures. But they're not so egregiously wrong as to make the pack unusable. If you wanted you could hunt them down and remove them if you really didn't like them.

Xenius' Character Enhancement - A full makeover for the NPCs (and PC). It stays lore friendly but characters now look much better than in vanilla.

Realistic Lighting Overhaul - For this I recommend only using the Adaptive Interiors portion. The next mod will cover you for outdoors.

Project Reality - Climates of Tamriel - The most comprehensive and awesome lighting and weather mod so far released. If you use Realistic Lighting for interiors then don't install any of the interior options for this mod.

So there you go. Twelve mods that will all work nicely together and give you a complete visual overhaul. There is however a WARNING: VRAM INTENSIVE. If you have less than 2GB of VRAM I would highly recommend you not install the complete version of SkyrimHD and instead install the Lite version. They're both hosted on the same mod page. I'd then work from the top to the bottom of the list and see what your framerates are like. If you're really VRAM limited I'd personally go with SkyrimHD-Lite, Book of Silence, Immersive Armors, WATER and the Silly Level of Detail mods. That will cover you for the majority of the textures in the game and only really be missing out on detail in a few areas.

4. Final ThoughtsI've covered just about everything that I can think of to cover. I'm sure that I missed something though. One thing that there really wasn't anywhere above to put up above. I wrote a rather involved post a few months ago describing how the game loaded assets and where conflicts can arise. It's not required reading in order to enjoy Skyrim (or even to get into modding it) but if you come across what you suspect to be a conflict it might help you to identify why you're having a problem. Hope it helps.

Hey jerk, I posted some legit mod lists too in that thread too, it was just... a really long time ago. And I'll have you know I spent as much as seven minutes googling for ways to export my NMM mod list this morning without resorting to hamhanded screenshotting. Arrow to the knee.

Hey jerk, I posted some legit mod lists too in that thread too, it was just... a really long time ago.

That's the problem. The damn search wasn't returning anything past mid-January this year. I ended up having to do a page by page flyby (thank the gods for Logitech's fast spin mousewheel) looking for any pages that had posts with lots of links (or bolds, I looked for bolds too).

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And I'll have you know I spent as much as seven minutes googling for ways to export for my NMM mod list this morning without resorting to hamhanded screenshotting. Arrow to the knee.

I like it. That's probably the basics all covered. Maybe if I stop being lazy for a while I'll put together a categorized list of mods that I am using, which is well over a 100 now.I've spent a lot of time adding and removing and changing mods around which go well with the general feel of the game, don't introduce out-of-place elements and don't interfere with each other or start crashing the game, so that might be useful for some.

Awesome, a new thread. The old one was getting kind of long in the tooth.

I wouldn't say that the Elder Scrolls wikia page "tends to focus on a higher level understanding of the game". What's that? I mean, is there any basis to it? The Wikia is missing a TON of stuff (and/or their search is broken... I suspect this is more accurate) but one thing about the Wikia is it's mobile friendl; it will format the page to fit your smartphone or iPod or iPhone or tablet or whatever you have. UESP is not mobile friendly at all, though it's not terribly hard to navigate.

Also, any list of essential mods without Categorized Favorites and Live Another Life feels incomplete. Most mods you could take or leave depending upon your preferences. But I cannot imagine anyone is still using that itty bitty favorites list that comes with the game. If you're changing your UI with SkyUI, Categorized Favorites is a logical extension of that. And for your first playthrough, you can skip Live Another Life, but after one or maybe two, I can't imagine wanting to do the long, drawn-out Helgen opening every time. And if I did, Live Another Life actually gives you the option. Or you can start out owning property (any of the ones you can buy, minus Hearthfire, but also including some farm in Dragon Bridge). My latest guy was mugged on the side of the road (south of Rorikstead, by the bandit tower, with wolves about to set upon me) and had to find his way. Or you can start in any guild. Great for role playing. And the Helgen stuff naturally flows from any start you choose. I'm level 36 and have only seen one dragon. It was in Dawnguard in the soul cairn. I have no souls and have unlocked no shouts. I'm basically not the Dragonborn and don't intend to be on this character. I'm just a guy making his way through Skyrim. Don't even know what a Dragonborn is (I'm a Dunmer).

I wouldn't say that the Elder Scrolls wikia page "tends to focus on a higher level understanding of the game". What's that? I mean, is there any basis to it? The Wikia is missing a TON of stuff (and/or their search is broken... I suspect this is more accurate)

That's the point of the statement. Wikia is surface level information (i.e. "high level", "higher level", however you want to say it) while UESP goes deep into the game with its information.

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Also, any list of essential mods without Categorized Favorites and Live Another Life feels incomplete.

Categorized Favorites is a bit in depth to get set up for a starter modder. That's who the visual list was targeted to. The default favorites menu isn't great, but if you're using it for favorites and not a generic quick-launch list it works fine. Unlike the entire rest of the UI. Besides, the Favorites menu is on the SkyUI todo list.

Life Another Life, OTOH, I might add. It's install and go, but it'll require a caveat that it not be used on a first-playthrough.

The Dawnguard DLC has caused a few of my characters to lose the services of the smith NPC at the entry to Whiterun.

How so? Is it a known bug or did Vamps get her (can they even spawn inside a walled city?)?

Vamps. They love Whiterun in all of my games. Most fun in this last run when I drank Aela's blood and happened upon a massive furball at the front gates on my way out to howl at the moon.

I run the 2x slower levelling mod and the current run is the highest I've ever bothered to take a character. A whopping level 26! Woo woo! I'm running into issues with the higher level bandit officers/leaders. They pull out a dagger and have a remarkable ability to oneshot my healthpool. I mean... I'm used to the occassional death-by-headbutt when going up against a 2H leader. A dagger though? It can be rather emberassing.

What else... ah yes. Fast travelling to my homestead to find a giant in my house. That is, I was outside, he was inside. Sort of. Most of him was. But not the moany bits. He was quite fond of lamenting his predicament.

I run the 2x slower levelling mod and the current run is the highest I've ever bothered to take a character. A whopping level 26! Woo woo! I'm running into issues with the higher level bandit officers/leaders. They pull out a dagger and have a remarkable ability to oneshot my healthpool. I mean... I'm used to the occassional death-by-headbutt when going up against a 2H leader. A dagger though? It can be rather emberassing.

The PC only gets 10 points of health a level if you pick it. It's very easy to end up with next to no HP, especially if you've been pumping magic or stamina (carry weight!) as well.

NPCs on the other hand, there's a huge health jump between enemy levels.

This also is why NPC mages are so damned dangerous while your spells hit like wet noodles.

Unfortunately both of these seem to be buggy, the first one moreso than the second. Every time vampires attack everyone runs inside (good) and locks the doors (also good) but when the attacks end, they don't reset. The only way to get stuff back to normal is to disable the mod after an attack.

Please don't consider this statement to be dickish or trollish. Its not my intent.

I enjoy talking games with Ars folk, and friends I've made on Ars. I don't want to go to other websites. I'm a bit offended that in the start of this post, you tell us to "If you're looking for walkthroughs, character information or just browsing for random information you should tend to head to ESW". Ars is the website I like. I don't want to go to other places.

Could there possibly be a separate thread for the discussion of Skyrim playing? I don't mod, have no intention to mod, and I really don't care about the discussion of it. I do, however, enjoy talking about new areas in the game, or talking about the quests. The other thread got really, really, mod-heavy, and the game discussion was shunted to the side.

Again, this isn't a troll. I want to talk game playing with my Ars friends who play the game, and aren't focused on modding.

Unfortunately both of these seem to be buggy, the first one moreso than the second. Every time vampires attack everyone runs inside (good) and locks the doors (also good) but when the attacks end, they don't reset. The only way to get stuff back to normal is to disable the mod after an attack.

Just like to say I don't have this problem, so its not universal. Maybe some other AI mod is conflicting with them or something. Upon reflection I did once have Whiterun mysteriously empty which may have been due to this issue but it went away on its own after a bit, no uninstalling required.

I run the 2x slower levelling mod and the current run is the highest I've ever bothered to take a character. A whopping level 26! Woo woo! I'm running into issues with the higher level bandit officers/leaders. They pull out a dagger and have a remarkable ability to oneshot my healthpool. I mean... I'm used to the occassional death-by-headbutt when going up against a 2H leader. A dagger though? It can be rather emberassing.

The PC only gets 10 points of health a level if you pick it. It's very easy to end up with next to no HP, especially if you've been pumping magic or stamina (carry weight!) as well.

NPCs on the other hand, there's a huge health jump between enemy levels.

This also is why NPC mages are so damned dangerous while your spells hit like wet noodles.

Yeah, I run on Master with a sword&board marksman atm. The NPC health boost is obvious as is the vast discrepency in spell effects. Logically one assumes that NPC weapon skills are likewise tweaked but the extent did not hit home until I started getting gibbed by single dagger strikes. At this point a badass bandit is far more dangerous with a dagger than anything else. The NPC boost pumps the dagger damage high enough to one - two shot me and dagger swings are much, much faster and therefore harder to block or otherwise mitigate than even 1H blades.

On the other hand, without said badass bandits not much would provide a challenge. At this stage the only real dangers are spellcasters, badass bandits, and the occasional sneaky or tagteam bear/cat combos. Oh. And chauruses. Chaurusi. Their poison alpha strikes are brutal.

Quick correction: the recently updated official High-Res Texture pack (now ~4.3gigs) by Bethesda does NOT require the skyrim.ini file edit anymore to play nice with replacement textures. Since patch 1.5 or thereabouts, all loose data files will load after bsa files. As long as the texture pack bsa files are high up in the load order, any subsequent textures such as those found in the texture or mesh subdirectories will simply overwrite anything in the bsa archives as needed without conflict. One less thing to worry about.

Also, If I may suggest just one more essential texture mod to your list, consider adding 'Enhanced Blood Textures' (version 3.0c) from the Nexus. It truly is a must have!

Please don't consider this statement to be dickish or trollish. Its not my intent.

I enjoy talking games with Ars folk, and friends I've made on Ars. I don't want to go to other websites. I'm a bit offended that in the start of this post, you tell us to "If you're looking for walkthroughs, character information or just browsing for random information you should tend to head to ESW". Ars is the website I like. I don't want to go to other places.

Could there possibly be a separate thread for the discussion of Skyrim playing? I don't mod, have no intention to mod, and I really don't care about the discussion of it. I do, however, enjoy talking about new areas in the game, or talking about the quests. The other thread got really, really, mod-heavy, and the game discussion was shunted to the side.

Again, this isn't a troll. I want to talk game playing with my Ars friends who play the game, and aren't focused on modding.

This thread is for all things Skyrim, not just modding. The reason the OP has so much information about modding is because in the previous thread, we had over 300 pages (over 4000 posts) worth of information, and it was almost impossible to find anything of value. So we collected all the good bits in the OP so people don't have to scan the thread for their intended info.

This thread is for all things Skyrim, not just modding. The reason the OP has so much information about modding is because in the previous thread, we had over 300 pages (over 4000 posts) worth of information, and it was almost impossible to find anything of value. So we collected all the good bits in the OP so people don't have to scan the thread for their intended info.

It seemed like every other page had a "... so, what are the best mods" question. Really, there are so damned many and what people want is so subjective that it's not easy to answer.

I enjoy talking games with Ars folk, and friends I've made on Ars. I don't want to go to other websites. I'm a bit offended that in the start of this post, you tell us to "If you're looking for walkthroughs, character information or just browsing for random information you should tend to head to ESW". Ars is the website I like. I don't want to go to other places.

That statement wasn't intended to be read as a "don't ask those questions here" but as a guideline for what kind of information Elder Scrolls Wiki has for people looking for specific types of information. We're more than happy to help out when people get stuck on quests, run into strange bugs or just want to know how something works, but no one here could possibly have the amount of information those two sites have.

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Could there possibly be a separate thread for the discussion of Skyrim playing? I don't mod, have no intention to mod, and I really don't care about the discussion of it. I do, however, enjoy talking about new areas in the game, or talking about the quests. The other thread got really, really, mod-heavy, and the game discussion was shunted to the side.

I think that for the most part the main game discussion was shunted off because people had discussed most of the commonly experienced elements over the course of the prior year. Speaking for myself only (though I'm sure the sentiment is the same for everyone else who commonly posts in the thread) I'm more than happy to continue talking about aspects of the game and its story alongside the discussions about mods.

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I want to talk game playing with my Ars friends who play the game, and aren't focused on modding.

Quick correction: the recently updated official High-Res Texture pack (now ~4.3gigs) by Bethesda does NOT require the skyrim.ini file edit anymore to play nice with replacement textures. Since patch 1.5 or thereabouts, all loose data files will load after bsa files. As long as the texture pack bsa files are high up in the load order, any subsequent textures such as those found in the texture or mesh subdirectories will simply overwrite anything in the bsa archives as needed without conflict. One less thing to worry about.

Herp, derp. That's what I get for simply copy and pasting that from my older list.